The Changeling
by Yami no Kaiba
Summary: Dead Story. A year 4 to 5 book. Severus Snape has been keeping a secret for a long time now, except to Dumbledore. When asked to return to the fold, will he be forced to reveal it to the Dark Lord?


The Changeling

Chapter 1 - Setting the Stage.

By: Emerald Star

I paled as I heard it.

"Severus, you know what I must ask you to do. If you are ready…if you are prepared…"

The people in front of me, Dumbledore and Potter, watched me. Dumbledore probably saw the fear that flitted across my face. Potter? Who knows what goes on in that mind.

I straightened up. I have always known these past fourteen years I would have to return. Return from where I had come. Shivering I held my head high. "I am." I knew fear was plain in my eyes.

"Then good luck."

Knowing I still had an audience to my actions, I nodded sharply and swept out of the room as I have for the past fourteen years. Once out of the rooms, I walked fast for perhaps three minutes before I broke into a run. Had anyone been watching, they would wonder where the fire was. They would never guess to the true reason I ran.

Which was fear. I feared what I had to do. At the same time I sneered in disgust at my fear.

There have never been many of my kind. After all, only one is born every fifty years. And I was present when the one before I was murdered.

There is a reason that there are so few of us. Are abilities are dangerous. It was because Mr. Bones refused to call the armies that he died at the Dark Lords hands.

*---*---*---*---*

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Severus straightened in confusion as he finished his bow to Voldemort. Why had he been called?

A groan came from the ground behind the Dark Lord. As Voldemort moved aside to receive another Death Eater, Snape eyes widened behind his mask. No…

Struggling back to consciousness before him was a man bound in ropes and gagged. But that wasn't what caught Severus's attention.

The man was as thin and willowy as a man could get, pale skinned, with his black hair caught in a pony tail at the nap of his neck. But most of all it was the ears that caught his attention. They were elven. Exactly like my own that were hidden by my greasy black shoulder length hair that wouldn't move in the wind.

As the man's black obsidian eyes opened and locked with my own, I knew what he was. He was the other Changeling.

And as are eyes held contact, memories that were not mine entered my thoughts. I watched in fascination as I saw his life up till now. His triumphs, his defeats, his delight in making friends with any magical animal that he met, and his love for his family and his little baby daughter Susan.

It was a shock when his gaze left mine as he was kicked by the Dark Lord. What had been going on? With a start I realized that well our meeting had been going on, Lord Voldemort had been starting with the inquiry. When he had noticed that the Changeling had not been paying attention to a single thing he said, he had kicked the bound man, breaking our eye contact.

I watched the rest of the night with the other Death Eater's as the Changeling was tortured, promised that the pain would stop if he would join the Dark Lord and call the armies of the magical animals to the Dark One's purpose.

I watched as the older Changeling screamed and writhed, and when he shrieked, I winced when anything that was glass in the general vicinity shattered.

"I'd never make them join with you!" he hissed in the language of the snakes, his last parting shot at the Dark Lord, allowing him to know that the legends were true, that Changelings can speak in the tongue of any beast. Showing the Dark Lord what he would never let him have.

It was then that I understood the reason behind my parents' fear of me being found out, why they had drilled me never to wash or cut my hair above shoulder length, to stay in the background of events.

It was that same night that I went to Dumbledore. It was that night as I heard my elder ask his last request that I turned away from what the Dark Lord offered.

"Protect them…" was the last soft hiss the man said.

*---*---*---*---*


End file.
